Having rewatched Jean Cocteau's 1950 "Orpheus," predictably drove me back to rewatch the first installment of his "Orpheus trilogy," the 1930 nearly dialogueless "Le sang d'un poète" (Blood of a Poet). (The final, 1960 installment, "Testament of Orpheus" is now even more inevitable, though I recalled not much liking it and my review shows I remembered correctly, though I don't dislike it.)

I'm somewhat puzzled by the singular indefinite article (s: "un", "a"). There are four segments, so why not "poets"? Or if they are all representations of Cocteau (who had many talents but considered himself primarily a poet), why not a definite article ("le"/"the")?

Cocteau provided "poetic" narration for most of his films. At the start of "Sang" he proclaims that the movie is "a realistic documentary of unreal events." More a representation of some of Cocteau's obsessions in dreamlike form than what anyone else would consider documentary-like, the film has a number of tableaux vivants, only some of which "come to life." Cocteau himself does not appear in front of the camera (until "The Testament of Orpheus), but his drawings play prominent parts, with lots of five-pointed stars.

The first and last images are of a tall brick chimney collapsing: that is, being dynamited. Perhaps the chimney is just a chimney, not a symbol of patriarchy, though I'd doubt this even without the transvestite in the middle of the movie and another leading the applause in the theater boxes in the last segment.

Perhaps that is "killing with kindness." Art, specifically sculpture, is also smashed in two segments.

The "poet" in the first segment is a painter, shirtless but having a powdered wig (Errique Rivero) . He seems to be a court painter, and the artists/painters (including, I'd say, Jean Marais as the 1949 Orpheus) are not starving artists like Amedeo Modigliani (who painted and, according to Jeffrey Meyers's biography of Modigliani, disliked the fashionable Jean Cocteau), but entertainers of the elite. This is most blatant in the last section with high society figures in evening dress applauding the poet shooting himself onstage for their entertainment. (Whether the elite was celebrating the artist's suicide or politely applauding the spectacle staged for them was a matter of public controversy when the film was released. The Vicomte de Noailles commissioned not only "Le Sang d'un Poète" but Buñuel's "L'age d'or" which had an even more scandalized opening. The official surrealists considered "Sang" insufficiently shocking, lacking jarring montages... and too homoerotic.)

There is a lot of grist for analytic milling in what the artist sees through keyholes in the Hotel des Folies in the second section, after having gone through a mirror that I will not grind.

I will mention liking the upbeat music supplied by Georges Auric, the member of "Les Six," a loose group of composers promoted by Cocteau, who also worked with Stravinsky (the neo-classic "Oedipus"). The film-making seems creaky. Auric's music definitely is not.

The splendidly remastered Criterion edition includes material by Cocteau on how the special effects were achieved and a1984 documentary by Edgardo Cozarinsky, "Jean Cocteau: Autobiography of an Unknown" that provides a useful introduction to the multi-media poet and his obsessions.

As for rating, as often is the case, I am puzzled about "Compared to what?" "Le sang d'un poète" is a classic of the avant garde of the 1920s, and one of the best films of 1930 — "above average"—, but inferior to the best Cocteau films (Orphée, La belle et le bête, Les enfants terribles) and with inferior mirror effects and a staging of the after-school snowball fight in which the future artist is struck down by a snowball containing a rock hurled by the fascinating (to Cocteau) hoodlum Dargelos. These are comparisons by which "Sang" would be rated "below average". "Average" is cannot be! Cocteau would have preferred being castigated to being considered "average"!

"Sang" only runs 50 minutes. It is a key work in the history of "experimental" film, pioneering the stop-action work of Maya Deren in particular and various weirdnesses of David Lynch more recently.

©2009, Stephen O. Murray

This is part of the French finds for Barbara Fields writeoff continuing through tomorrow, the one-month anniversary of our collective loss.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD